By JAMEY KEATEN and THOMAS ADAMSON
GENEVA (AP) — Jean-Luc Godard, the enduring “enfant terrible” of the French New Wave who revolutionized fashionable cinema in 1960 together with his first function, “Breathless,” and stood for years amongst world cinema’s most significant administrators, has died. He was 91.
Swiss information company ATS quoted Godard’s accomplice, Anne-Marie Mieville, and her producers as saying he died peacefully and surrounded by his family members at his residence within the Swiss city of Rolle, on Lake Geneva, on Tuesday.
French President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute to Godard as “the most iconoclastic of the New Wave directors” who “invented a resolutely modern, intensely free art form.”
He added: “We have lost a national treasure, the eye of a genius.”
Godard defied conference over an extended profession that started within the Nineteen Fifties as a movie critic. He rewrote the principles for digital camera, sound and narrative.
He labored with among the best-known actors in French cinema, akin to Jean-Paul Belmondo, who was propelled to stardom by Godard movies, and Brigitte Bardot, who starred in his acclaimed 1963 work “Contempt.”
Referencing Godard’s breakout first function, Bardot, 87, paid homage to his genius on Twitter: “And it was breathless that he joined the firmament of the last great star creators.”
He profiled the early Rolling Stones, gave a voice to Marxist, leftist and Nineteen Sixties-era Black Power politics, and his controversial trendy nativity play “Hail Mary” grabbed headlines when Pope John Paul II denounced it in 1985.
While lots of his works had been lauded, Godard additionally made a string of movies that had been politically charged and experimental, and happy few outdoors a small circle of followers, whereas irritating many critics who noticed them as full of overblown intellectualism.
Cannes Film Festival Director Thierry Fremaux informed The Associated Press on Tuesday that he was “sad, sad. Immensely so” on the information of Godard’s dying.
Born right into a rich French-Swiss household on Dec. 3, 1930 in Paris, Godard grew up in Nyon, Switzerland and studied ethnology on the Sorbonne in France’s capital, the place he was more and more drawn to the cultural scene that flourished within the Latin Quarter “cine-club” after World War II.
He turned buddies with future big-name administrators Francois Truffaut, Jacques Rivette and Eric Rohmer and in 1950 based the short-lived Gazette du Cinema. By 1952 he had begun writing for the celebrated film journal Cahiers du Cinema.
After engaged on two movies by Rivette and Rohmer in 1951, Godard tried to direct his first film whereas touring by North and South America together with his father, however by no means completed it.
Back in Europe, he took a job in Switzerland as a development employee on a dam undertaking. He used the pay to finance his first full movie, the 1954 “Operation Concrete,” a 20-minute documentary concerning the constructing of the dam.
Returning to Paris, Godard labored as spokesman for an artists’ company and made his first function in 1957 — “All Boys Are Called Patrick,” launched in 1959 — and continued to hone his writing.
He additionally started work on “Breathless,” primarily based on a narrative by Truffaut. It was to be Godard’s first huge success when it was launched in March 1960.
The film stars Belmondo as a penniless younger thief who fashions himself on Hollywood film gangsters and who, after he shoots a police officer, goes on the run to Italy together with his American girlfriend, performed by Jean Seberg.
His cinematic creations had been suffused with gritty, sassy tones of a resurgent postwar France — recognized domestically because the “Glorious 30” years by to the late Seventies — and so they served up among the most poignant photographs and contours from what was then a wealthy, avant-garde heyday of French filmmaking.
The photographs in “Breathless” of an ingenue Seberg traipsing alongside Paris’ Champs-Elysees to hawk “New York Herald Tribune” newspapers in a decent T-shirt, and close-ups of a cigarette-smoking, fedora-wearing Belmondo working a thumb methodically, pensively throughout his lips could possibly be enshrined among the many most memorable photographs of French cinema.
Along with Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows,” launched in 1959, Godard’s movie set a brand new tone for French film aesthetics. Godard rejected standard narrative type and as a substitute used frequent jump-cuts that mingled philosophical discussions with motion scenes.
He spiced all of it up with references to Hollywood gangster films and nods to literature and visible artwork.
Godard additionally launched what was to be a career-long participation in collective movie initiatives, contributing scenes to “The Seven Deadly Sins” together with administrators akin to Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim. He additionally labored with Ugo Gregoretti, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Roberto Rossellini on the Italian film “Let’s Have a Brainwash,” with Godard’s scenes portraying a disturbing post-apocalypse world.
Godard, who was later to achieve a status for his uncompromising left-wing political opinions, had a primary brush with French authorities in 1960 when he made “The Little Soldier.” The film, full of references to France’s colonial struggle in Algeria, was not launched till 1963, a 12 months after the battle ended.
His work turned extra starkly political by the late Nineteen Sixties. In “Weekend,” his characters lampoon hypocrisy in bourgeois society whilst they exhibit the comedian futility of violent class struggle. It got here out a 12 months earlier than fashionable anger on the institution shook France, culminating within the iconic however short-lived pupil unrest of May 1968.
Godard harbored a life-long sympathy for numerous types of socialism depicted in movies from the early Seventies to the Nineties.
Some of world cinema’s biggest administrators counted Godard’s boundary-breaking work as an affect, together with Quentin Tarantino, Bernardo Bertolucci, Brian De Palma and Jonathan Demme.
Godard took potshots at Hollywood over time.
He remained residence in Switzerland reasonably than journey to Hollywood to obtain an honorary Oscar at a personal ceremony in November 2010 alongside movie historian and preservationist Kevin Brownlow, director-producer Francis Ford Coppola and actor Eli Wallach.
His lifelong advocacy of the Palestinian trigger additionally introduced him repeated accusations of antisemitism, regardless of his insistence that he sympathized with the Jewish folks and their plight in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Though the academy obtained some complaints about Godard being chosen to obtain the award, academy President Tom Sherak stated the director was acknowledged solely “for his contributions to film in the New Wave era.”
Godard married Danish-born mannequin and actress Anna Karina in 1961. She appeared in a string of films he made in the course of the the rest of the Nineteen Sixties, all of them seen as New Wave landmarks. Notable amongst them had been “My Life to Live,” “Alphaville” and “Crazy Pete” — which additionally starred Belmondo and was rumored to have been shot with out a script. Godard and Karina divorced in 1965.
Godard married his second spouse, Anne Wiazemsky, in 1967. He later began a relationship with Swiss filmmaker Anne-Marie Mieville. Godard divorced Wiazemsky in 1979, after he had moved with Mieville to the Swiss municipality of Rolle, the place he lived along with her for the remainder of his life.
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Adamson reported from Paris. Former AP correspondent John Heilprin contributed biographical materials to this report.
Source: www.bostonherald.com”